The 4 Fundamentals of Generating Membership Site Profits

Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

There are a lot of different ways to monetize your membership site, however when pushes comes to shove, there are 4 fundamental ways to profit from your membership site. You can get more members, increase your retention rate, increase total sales to current members, and of course niche-specific ventures. Here is a closer look at 4 fundamental ways that you can use your membership site to make money.

1. Getting More Members

There are a number of ways that you increase the number of members that join your website. Some of the most common and most successful tactics are recruiting affiliate marketers, PPC ads, banner ads, and organic traffic. There are also additional methods of increasing conversions such as improving your sales page, building a list, and improving your overall sales funnel. No matter how bad all of your other monetization tactics are, increasing your member base will always increase your revenue (assuming you have a paid membership site).

2. Increasing Retention

By increasing the number of renewals per subscriber, you not only gain more members paying their monthly membership fees, but also increase your profit from complimentary profit sources as well. Improving retention can be a difficult task, but the first thing you must do is find out when most members not renewing their membership. This will give you a good idea of when people are losing interest and allow you to deploy additional marketing measure and/or promotions to convince them to remain members. This information also might help you discover what content people are less impressed with as well as like the most.

3. Increasing Total Sales

If you are only making money off of membership fees, then it is time to expand your profit funnel. By promoting quality, useful, complimentary products, you will be able to increase your total sales. If you are currently already promoting products, then increasing the effectiveness of those promotions or increasing the frequency of those promotions can boost membership site profits as well.

4. Niche Specific Exercises

There are a variety of niche specific exercises that can prove profitable as well. Normally, these exercises will boost your total number of members and/or your total number of sales. Some examples of niche specific exercises include: joint ventures, product creation, cross-list promotion, selling advertising space, and much more. Choosing what types of activities would be most profitable is largely based upon your specific niche and what the customers in your niche need or want.

As you can see, all of the different ways to profit from a membership site fall into these 4 fundamental categories. The key is to identify what actions you are taking to profit from each of these categories as well as what you can improve upon in each of these categories. By doing this, you will be able to extract as much profit from your membership sites as possible.